


a little time spent in 3 am

by xx_bittersweet_merlin



Series: naruto wlw fics [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Butch/Femme, F/F, Lesbian Character, Mild Sexual Content, POV Lesbian Character, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 00:09:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15303111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xx_bittersweet_merlin/pseuds/xx_bittersweet_merlin
Summary: Naori often has free time at the end of her shifts. It isn't hard to slip out of camp and into small towns no one really notices. Quiet music, lazy smoke curls in the air, an easy way to relax, but tonight seems more hectic. The bar has a few more unfamiliar faces and one in particular that's been eyeing her all night. (And how long the night seems to be stretching, considering that they accidentally start a hotel fire and go off in search of a supposed werewolf, but she'll appreciate the friends she makes, even if they can't be permanent. Also, why are there pigeon feathers on the bar?)





	a little time spent in 3 am

**Author's Note:**

> today we're drinking the respect lesbians and respect he/him lesbians juice

The evening was oddly warm. Nights in the Land of Fire around this time of year tended to get cold enough that extra blankets were needed to sleep, not that the Uchiha had many extra blankets. Naori usually ended up crawling into Kotori’s bedroll for warmth, or bunking with the other woman’s cousin, Tsubaki, if Kotori was out on patrol.

Tonight, though, the air was tepid enough that she’d gotten by with only a fairly thin yukata. It was the only pretty piece of clothing she owned, a purple that matched the tint of her hair. It had taken her a few weeks, back during the previous year, to sew a line of little silver flowers around the collar.

A leaf crunched under her sandal. They were starting to wear on the bottom- too much skidding and too many hard impacts when she dodged on the battlefield. Sandals were cheap, fortunately, the one thing they could regularly replace, unlike the armor they sometimes salvaged from other clans.

Sometimes she wondered how many more pairs of sandals she was going to go through before she no longer needed any. There was no use burning a good pair of sandals with the dead’s bodies.

The bell above the doorway of the bar she frequented let out the tiniest ring when she stepped through. Kotori came with her, more often than not, but she was still on patrol, as Naori had been for the last three days.

Madara and Izuna were paranoid about an attack on their camp. Naori couldn’t say she wasn’t, either, but she wished it was different. She didn’t want to live like this forever.

She relaxed when the door was closed behind her. The tavern was familiar. It held a degree of anonymity and a silent set of agreements that gave her some peace of mind.

The bartender looked up and nodded at her. He was the same woman who’d been working there for the last five months, but Naori still didn’t know much about his name other than that everyone unanimously called him Red. It wasn’t because of his hair- which was a subdued brown- or his eyes- which were also a subdued brown- or even because of his clothing, rough cotton in earth tones.

Naori had asked about the nickname once but had only gotten a mischievously secretive smile in return and been told she would have to guess. She’d devolved to joking about it every time she came in rather than making earnest attempts.

“But if you can guess the reason without any context,” the other woman had told her, “you can know my real name.”

“You have a red koi fish you won a prize in the town festival with,” she said as she sat down.

Red, in the midst of pouring something the color of honey into another woman’s glass, didn’t even cock an eyebrow at her. “No. Why don’t you collaborate with Brownie? I’m sure she wants to know too.”

Naori let her eyes drift to the other patron sitting two stools away from her. She was clad in fairly low-end leather armor with only one shoulder, with, for some reason, a green tassel hanging from a cord strung tightly around her waist.

“If you’re not going to tell me, I’m not going to guess,” the woman said, a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. She sounded, dare say, quite grumpy; the way Red grinned in unrepentance made Naori think it was sulking.

“Have you gotten more people with colors for names?”

“Well, there’s Pinky,” Red replied, sounding as if he was actually considering it despite Naori asking rhetorically. “And someone called Blue came in last week. Maybe it’s popular.”

The other woman at the bar grumbled and pulled her glass closer to herself, staring into her alcohol. “The only reason he even calls me that is because of that catastrophe two months ago.”

“Catastrophe?”

“I was baking something,” Red explained, sliding her a glass. “And I asked her to help, since she was the only one here. Might as well do something useful instead of moping around alone, you know?” The words were harsh, but his tone was teasing. “I still don’t know what she did, but when I came back my batter was brown, goopy, and made this weird cake when it came out of the oven in back.”

“So you…call her Brownie?”

“Well, I called the _cake_ a brownie, and it did taste good. But she has brown hair and eyes and clothes, too, and I don’t like convoluted nicknames anyway.”

“Obviously silly ones are better,” Brownie muttered under her breath.

“What _did_ you do to the batter?” Naori asked, unable to deny her curiosity. She’d had little cakes made with butter and vanilla and sugar before, when the clan had a bit more money.

A blush began to heat the other woman’s cheeks. Red snickered, moving off down the room to clean some of his dirty glasses, leaving her to explain herself. “Well, I…knocked some things into it by accident. I’m not quite sure what all of them…were…but there was a large bin of chocolate.”

“That was expensive!” Red cried from the other end of the room, gathering a moment’s attention from the other women in the bar but not disturbing them much. “Do you know how expensive chocolate is?”

“I replaced it!” Brownie snapped, slamming her glass into the bar harder than necessary. “We’ve had this argument twenty times!”

“All that chocolate, gone!”

“You liked what I made anyway!”

“I have legal rights to the idea!”

Naori snickered. Brownie’s head jerked around, and she seemed to remember she was there, as a blush took ahold of her face again as she settled down, appearing to try and recollect herself. “Anyway, that’s…why he calls me Brownie.”

The woman set her jaw and shifted, obviously a bit awkward now that there was a lull in the conversation. Naori smiled. “Naori,” she offered, trailing a fingertip over the rim of her glass. It wasn’t always the smartest idea to offer her name in places outside the clan, but she was quite unknown, and regardless, the bar was a bit different. She’d seen some women she’d spotted on the battlefield before, in there, and they made silent accords to forget that fact for even just an evening.

Brownie opened her mouth. She paused for a second, obviously considering, and cleared her throat. “Kato,” she finally said, giving her a nod.

Naori fell silent and examined her out of the corner of her eye. The woman was of strong stock; her shoulders were wider than Naori’s own, her stance wider, her skin darker. The bone structure- the way she held herself- it all reminded Naori of a Senju.

It was probably dangerous, sitting at a bar with a Senju, but it was a night out.

She looked over her shoulder and glanced around the bar, filling in a few smaller details she’d missed in her once-over when she’d stepped inside. A woman with a ridiculous amount of pink hair in a braid was most likely the Pinky Red had referred to. No one else with clear color-coding, but Pinky was sitting with a woman Naori was certain was a Yamanaka, if her hair and eye color were any indications.

Her eyes landed on a booth in the corner. A woman with pitch black hair was sprawled out in one side of it, leaning against the wall with one leg propped up on the seat, breathing out smoke from a cigar in hand.

It was hard to tell, sometimes, who there was a shinobi or a civilian- there were two shinobi there already, and that might have worried Naori if she hadn’t been coming so long- but she betted that this one was a shinobi. The smoke in the air was curling into subtle shapes that were probably guided by chakra.

Naori looked away when she realized she’d graduated to staring at a pair of brown eyes. She glanced back at Kato, who had begun to grimace at something. “Drink not agreeing with you?”

“Red’s idea of a joke,” Kato replied wryly, narrowing her eyes over her shoulder. “I swear to god, I’m going to stab him someday.”

Considering the woman was obviously a ninja, Naori thought it was ironic how she could make such a joke without being taken seriously.

“This is the exact record he had playing when he made me help him bake,” Kato continued, glaring at the bar top. “He hasn’t played it for months. It’s been bothering me the entire time I’ve been in here.”

Naori glanced over at the record player that sat in the far corner of the room. The music was quiet, too quiet to be heard from outside, and playing something cheery and upbeat. “Where did you even get that?” she asked curiously as Red came back around.

He gave them a cheerful smile. “Stole it! I have two other records you can pick from. Stole those too. They’re in the storage room.”

He jerked his thumb in the direction of the only other door in the room, one that led into the hall where a few other rooms were. They were, technically, all part of the old barn the building had been built off of, and a few of them still only had stall doors instead of actual doors.

Kato glared at the bartender. Rolling her eyes, Naori got up and headed across the room, stepping through the curtain over the doorway into the back.

There was an old stall across from her with an untold amount of junk in it, piled up to waist-level. She grimaced and walked past it. No amount of bribery could make her root through that mess.

The next one had been converted into an actual room with a lock on it. A small wooden sign had been nailed into it that read _booze_. Naori took a moment to pinch her nose in exasperation and moved on, heading for the next one, marked with _storaginald_. _I named it after some dumbass from Bear Country,_ Red had said, once, _he was called Reginald or something. I didn’t really pay much attention._

The inside was, at least, more organized, hosting actual shelving with a large variety of things that Red probably thought were all very useful in some way. Naori hunted down the records and sighed at the labels on them: _sex music_ and _sad sex music_.

“He needs to be stopped,” she muttered to herself, picking up _sex music_ and returning to the bar.

Unsurprisingly, the record playing was labeled _time to get fucking_. Naori rolled her eyes and fiddled with the machine until the second record was properly playing. She had to tap the side a few times, as she’d seen Red do before, as apparently it had been “just slightly damaged, just a little bit” when he stole it.

She returned to her place at the bar and sat down. The woman in the corner looked at her again as she passed, eyes quiet and half-lidded, and Naori glanced at the smoke swirl that floated in front of her for her to walk through with a smile as something warm rolled up her spine.

“I’m telling you, it doesn’t work like that,” Kato was saying as she sat down, sounding, again, vaguely irritated for the sake of winning the argument. “It has a snap-”

“And I’m telling you, it does,” Red interrupted her, waving a feather duster he’d picked up at some point back and forth. “The exact same artisan made both of them, Brownie! They’re exactly the same!”

“I’ve _never_ been able to buckle that part, never-”

“That’s because you’re impatient,” Red teased, snickering when she glared at him. “I would know! Remember that time we slept together?”

Kato grimaced. Naori watched, a bit fascinated, in the way one watching a sports match would be. Seeing the way someone else’s bond with another functioned, with all the hidden references and inside jokes and experiences only they were aware of, had always interested her, probably because she had so few herself.

“We kept bickering over who got to wear the strap,” she told Naori, though she sounded more wryly amused than truly annoyed, so she guessed it had been an experience that made for jokes rather than a truly unpleasant one. “We didn’t fit very well.”

Red wrinkled his nose. “That strap didn’t fit very well,” he corrected, brushing off a perfectly clean part of the bar with the duster. “I swear some crafters think all women have hips the size of a fourteen-year old’s.”

There were several lanterns hanging from the ceiling behind the bar, one of which had begun to wane. It cast a different angle of light onto the bar beyond Kato’s chair; Naori squinted as her gaze caught on something she hadn’t noticed before for how well it blended in.

“Is that a feather?” she asked, mildly befuddled, making Red glance at her in confusion. He followed her gaze and lit up.

“Oh! Yes, a pigeon feather,” he said, darting over to it and retrieving it. He came back over and held it up to them with a smile. “I was looking for this for an hour.”

Naori raised an eyebrow. The feather was small, probably from a messenger bird, and he’d painted it with a palette of browns and deep reds. He whirled and put it inside of a glass.

Kato twitched. “Wash that out before serving anyone.”

“Brownie, I’ve told you a million times, the chances of catching anything from a pigeon-”

“I don’t care, it’s unsanitary!”

“You keep pigeons?” Naori interrupted, cutting a fresh bickering off. Kato took a sip of her drink, unbothered, and Red beamed at her.

“I have a coop out back, through that storage stall. They’re all settled in for tonight, but come earlier next time and I’ll show you.”

The Uchiha had a tendency towards both birds and cats, but pigeons and doves had a special place in Naori’s heart. She’d kept one herself, a little mourning dove she’d inherited from her mother, until it had died of old age. She’d been considering getting another- they were safe enough, considering Madara’s falcons kept watch over the clan’s pigeon coop.

There was a deep rumble from outside. Thunder in the distance; she hoped it abided by the time she returned to the encampment, otherwise she would have to spend the next morning cleaning her attire.

“I’ll take you up on that,” she said after a moment of listening to the rumble quieting, sipping at her sake.

Lightning struck down in the woods near the town. It was a small, nameless thing, made up of a single stretch of buildings on either side of a main road in a valley surrounded by tall trees on either side. It was easy to become content in.

The clock hanging on the wall above the bar let out a chime as it struck twelve. “There’s midnight,” Red announced, again sweeping a spot that had not a single speck of dust on it. “Settle in, lassies, and have a fun night.”

He said that every night- almost no one ever came in after midnight, another unspoken assumption due to the habits of the customers- but something about this time felt incredibly odd.

Naori chalked it up to a mood and leaned against the bar. She decided to take it slow and listen to Kato and Red start another silly argument again- she had plenty of time before six when she would have to leave.

Something tickled her ear. Naori looked over her shoulder and found it was part of a tiny little smoke koi fish that was already dissipating, just barely there; the woman in the corner was looking at her again, looking amused. Naori smiled at her.


End file.
